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Dennis the Menace, 6/5/14

Dennis stood, transfixed, watching the spider move purposefully across its web. Here, he thought, was the antidote to the modern world of human civilization that he was already recognizing as a sham. The spider doesn’t worry itself about book-learning, like Margaret, or about proper decorum, like his parents, or about peace and quiet, like Mr. Wilson. It just sits on its web, a web it created out of nothing, out of its own body, biding its time, until a prey animal falls into its trap — and then it strikes, and feeds. Everything humanity has done — its cities, its cars, its governments, its data networks that sell us the lie that we connect with one another, when really we sit at home alone, bathed in sickly artificial light — all that paled in comparison to the spider’s simple, beautiful, and alien creation. “Now that’s a web site,” Dennis whispered, in awe. It was extremely menacing.

Momma, 6/5/14

It’s easy for outsiders to see the North Korean practice of referring to Kim Il-sung, dead since 1994, as the “Eternal President of the Republic” as a symptom of that state’s baroque and deranged ideological underpinnings. But in fact, in practice it makes a certain amount of sense, from the point of view of the regime: you allow a revered figurehead, who cannot speak for himself, to become the mouthpiece for their unpopular decisions — decisions that as a result cannot be appealed. Momma knows the score.

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/29/14

In the 9th and 10th centuries, spices were unfathomably expensive in Western Europe; most came from the Muslim world and beyond, where the states were much more powerful than the chaotic post-Carolingian kingdoms, and so the Vikings usually had to offer money or legitimate trade items, rather than going with their usual M.O. of just raiding and looting. In other words, this scene is pretty much the early medieval Norse equivalent of a millionaire couple having sex on a bed covered in hundred-dollar bills.

Dennis the Menace, 5/29/14

“C’mon, Joey,” said Dennis. “Let’s go outside.”

“But … but Dennis, it’s pouring out. It’s been pouring out all day.”

“Whatever. We’re going out to play.”

And then they just stood there, under the umbrella that didn’t quite cover them both, for more than an hour. Dennis was staring at the sidewalk and the sign with an angry intensity. The silence was tense, electric. Joey didn’t dare move. He knew Dennis was thinking something, was about to say something, that he had brought him here for a reason — but for what? What did he have on his mind? What was he going to say? It was the most menacing evening Joey had ever spent. He knew his mother was waiting for him to come home, but he was too scared to leave.

Momma, 5/29/14

“Ha ha,” said the Hobbes siblings to each other, “Momma sure is having trouble parsing easy-to-understand English sentences!” None of them mentioned it, but they knew what they felt, that moment they walked into the living room and found her sitting in the chair, the TV still on, her head lolled grotesquely off to one side. For just a second, before her eyes jerked open and she started babbling nonsense, they all felt, deep in their hearts, the purest kind of freedom they’d ever known. They never talked about it, of course, but then again, they never had to.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/29/14

Hootin’ Holler’s soil is so poor and rocky that it cannot feed itself through subsistence agriculture; and yet, since it has nothing much else to offer economically, what food the inhabitants do manage to import from the outside world isn’t particularly plentiful or nourishing either.

Crankshaft, 5/29/14

Crankshaft is just a straight-up dick about everything, all the time.

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Mary Worth, 5/14/14

I’m not going to claim that Iris and Tommy’s dialogue in panel one consists of the greatest twenty-word sequence in the history of English prose, but let’s just say that it’s my current favorite, OK? I hereby order anyone who lives in Atlanta, New York, Houston, Phoenix, or any other city with a Midtown and who is talking about a restaurant in said neighborhood to say, airily, “you know, the eatery down in Midtown?” Will one of your friends respond with “Yeah, I know of it”? That all depends on whether you hang out with hardened meth-dealing ex-cons whose native tongue is the language of the streets, I guess!

This is, quite obviously, the beginning of the promised Redemption of Tommy, and I have to admit that I’m charmed by how extremely chill he’s being about it. “Enh, maybe that lady was right and I can expiate my past sins by finding a job. Hey, does this Jerry guy want to give me a job? Can’t hurt to find out, I guess.”

Dennis the Menace, 5/14/14

OK, let’s ignore the dumb wordplay and just acknowledge that Dennis is maintaining eye contact with his mother while dumping the meal she made for him directly into the trash. Would it be more menacing if he were saying “This is garbage, just like all the other garbage I have to put up with in your garbage house”? Yes, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Family Circus, 5/14/14

Oh, man, PJ is just delightfully smug in this panel. “That’s right, Dolly, you wallow in nostalgia all you want. Your day is done. I’m youth! This is PJ’s time now!”